“If
he could only tell us what we already knew, I’d agree. But what if it wasn’t
Firth?”
“You
really want to contemplate that? When it’s all wrapped up so neat and tidy,
starting with a clear motive and ending with a bit of natural justice?”
“I
think we’ve missed something big. You don’t want to know why. Not yet. But for
now, just help me. I need to make sure.”
Slowey
studied the duck that had waddled closer, flicking its emerald head from side
to side and eyeing them for more fatty titbits while it chuntered to itself
darkly.
“Doesn’t
he make you jealous? No cases, no deadlines, no mortgage, no emotional
blackmail from unhinged colleagues. Just a simple life of scavenging, gang-rape
and water-sport.”
“A
charming image. Don’t you take the kids to feed the ducks?”
“Yes,
but with them I have to pretend to like Mr Duck. Alright. What do you need?”
“Were
there any forensic hits at all, from the house or from the bypass?”
“Reports
are still trickling in. But nothing on Murphy’s body yet. As for the house, we
got a few fingerprint hits on exterior and interior glass. Most match the
Murphy family. Some don’t match the Murphys or anyone on the database.”
“Have
we taken elimination samples from all the neighbours yet?”
“I
don’t think so. It’s a low priority now. Why?”
“You
need to visit the Jennings family. Get elimination samples. Fingerprints and
DNA. Even if somebody already got them, say we lost them and get more. Then go
fishing. Study Marjorie’s initial account. Get another one. A full statement if
you’ve got time. Try to speak to Jeremy alone, if she’ll let you. Say you need
to evaluate him for the Vulnerable Witness Interview process. Either way, dig
around, politely. Then let me know what you think.”
“So
you want me to harass some stand-up citizens and their disabled son?”
“Someone
in that household saw something. If we let this blow over, someone could get
away with murder and that family will forever be under their cosh.”
“Well,
I’ll try to unchain this albatross you’ve got wrapped around your neck, but I
don’t think I can make it fly again.”
The
base rate remained fixed at a niggardly 0.5% and it seemed the latest lot to
sidle into government would keep it that way. After all, they needed the masses
to spend money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need otherwise the wheels
might grind to a halt and they’d all have to look at themselves and each other
instead of their giant plasmatronic fun-centres and play consoles.
Then
they might start thinking and the world would become even more desperate and
frightening than it already was. So the shopping masses must keep their easy
credit and to hell with the savers; those who saw beyond the next big holiday
or flash car or noisy gadget and planned for their own future. Marjorie ticked
a box on her mental job list: she would have to review her ledger to ensure
that Tony’s lump sum lasted as long as it needed to.
Yet
the nation would have to make savings somehow. The consumer economy must be
held sacred but everything else was fair game. The police were to be thinned
out and the prisons emptied, all in the name of efficiency; as if we needed
more thugs running amok with their noise and violence and vomit. Why Sharon had chosen to waste her brain on representing that type of person was just inexplicable.
Why on earth should criminals get protection at the public’s expense? Still,
she had at least moved into personal injury work now, even if she wasn’t nearly
picky enough about her clients.
A
few months into another change of government and still nobody would talk about
what was really going on. Every other worker seemed to a migrant, filling the
mini-buses that thronged the back-roads at first light, returning to their
ghettos at dusk to drink and sleep, here to live cheaply and earn quickly,
knowing the land had no future worth subscribing to. Feral kids roamed the
streets, itching to hurt you or steal from you for any reason or none, knowing
they had no reason to fear the police or anybody else, that they lived in a
world without consequence. Then they’d get each other pregnant, handing down
their misery from generation to generation.
And
the NHS was to be squeezed. If only the managers and the bean-counters were
culled, the idiots who ensured that Tony’s appointments disappeared into the
ether and nobody cleaned the wards or made sure the patients actually ate their
meals. Nursing had changed so much since her day; visiting or escorting Tony,
she no longer felt part of that institution; worse, she felt chilled by how
little anyone really cared.
Was
the real problem just that she was getting old? She didn’t recognise this
society and couldn’t call it her own. Behind these walls she held fast to her
tranquillity and safety, caring for her men: Tony, fighting hard but losing the
battle with the galloping corruption in his cells, and Jeremy, never changing,
always challenging. It was good to be back here at Marne Close, no longer
cluttering up Sharon’s world. Even with the stench from the fire-damaged walls,
it was better; quiet and safe again, now that the Murphys had gone. She
wouldn’t have chosen the manner of it, but the fact of their absence was a
thing to be treasured.
The
Murphys had chiselled away at her walls, reaching into her world and tainting
it with their violence, their noise, their smoke-filled tumult. They had
belonged to the new order, to a world without respect for others, a world where
neighbours should be treasured or wholly and politely excluded. When they
forced her to clasp an oxygen mask to Tony’s face to protect him from their smoke
night after night; when they forced her to pick up a phone to report the
beatings and raving to the authorities; when they ignored her or glowered at
her and laughed or played their disco music or satellite sport at horrendous
volumes; when they abused the rudiments in all of these ways, then they
included her in their tawdry world, and that was not tolerable.
Somebody
rapped at the front door, brisk and insistent. Her reverie faded as she folded
away the tabloid newspaper in which she’d been immersed and placed it on the
kitchen table, flush with the edge nearest the door to the lounge. Jeremy sat
cross-legged on the floor nearby, absorbed in auditing his die-cast car
collection, arranging it in alphabetical order and in line with the equally
spaced diagonals in the pattern of the carpet. She peeked around the door to
the lounge which she’d turned into Tony’s bedroom until the repairs upstairs
could be completed. He lay semi-upright in his bed, lank hair plastered to his
skull, eyes closed, pulse fluttering beneath the meagre flesh at his throat,
mouth lost in the haze beneath the oxygen mask. His hoarse breathing drowned
out the hissing of the oxygen cylinder, the whirring of the electric fan and
the footage of panzers charging across the Russian steppe in the documentary
he’d been watching. She checked that the curtains blocked out the noon sun as
well as they could and carefully closed the connecting door.
She
used the side door to exit the kitchen and made her way down the side path to
the front of the house where she found a short, shabby man in a cheap suit. Her
first impulse had been to draw his attention to the polite notice on the door
advising sales persons, hawkers and all unsolicited callers of that ilk that
they were not at all welcome. Then he turned and his harassed but kindly face
with its lop-sided grin took her back to that night with its fear and heat and
a feverish conversation in a car surely too tatty to belong to a public
servant.
“My
husband’s asleep, you see,” she whispered, beckoning him to follow her. “I know
we’ve met but you’ll forgive me for asking…”
“Ken
Slowey, madam,” said the policeman, producing his warrant card with a flourish.
“Detective Constable. At your service.”
“Yes,
I remember. You were very kind. We’re all most grateful. A terrible shame
about. Well. You know. Would you care for a cup of tea?”
“Now
you’re playing my tune.”
He
paused at the kitchen door, allowing her to enter first. With a start, she
turned and raised her hands as if to ward him away.
“I’m
terribly sorry,” she said, gathering her wits. “Jeremy doesn’t know you. He
doesn’t cope very well with new people. Please wait here for a minute.”
“Of
course.”
Slowey
nodded and moved away from the doorway, just out of Jeremy’s line of sight. He
smiled at her patiently, tapping his document case repeatedly against his right
hand as if he were testing the heft of a cosh.
Marjorie
closed the door. Like all the other windows and doors, it was double-glazed
with some sort of plastic frame. Sharon had insisted she replace the original
wooden fittings a few years ago with Tony’s compensation money, and she had to
admit she didn’t miss the condensation or traffic noise. Even so, she couldn’t
trust the door to be completely soundproof so she stooped and whispered to Jeremy
whose forehead was already creasing with anxiety that might become rage if it
wasn’t assuaged.
“Jeremy,
you know we talked about the night of the fire.”
“My
recollection is peerless,” he all but shouted.
“Can
you whisper, Jeremy? I bet you can.”
“Of
course,” he replied with his loudest whisper. “Susurration for espionage and
assignations and other secret stuff.”
“Well,
do you remember what to do if a policeman talks to you about it?”
“I
say what you said unto me to say unto the policeman.”
“And
what was that?”
“You
said I should say that I was asleep and didn’t see nothing and didn’t do
nothing and shouldn’t say anything at all unless I am asked and also that I’m
not to say that you told me to say anything but I must trust you because you
love me and always look after me.” Jeremy recounted his new mantra robotically
and returned to his cars, once again using emergency service vehicles to corral
the others.
“You’re
a good boy, Jeremy.”
“I
am superlative, the nonpareil of good boys.”
Marjorie
checked the impulse to touch Jeremy’s arm or tousle his hair, even after all
this time finding his aversion to her touch, any touch, a sore spot she
couldn’t help but probe. She found her own face reflected in the kitchen
window, pale, pinched and severe, the look of a bitter woman walking to the
gallows. She forced herself to breathe in deeply, closed her eyes and commanded
herself to become the woman they all wanted her to be, the woman she needed to
be.
A
heartbeat later she saw the meek and smiling mother once more, apologetic smile
and rounded shoulders in place, the supplicant displacing the uglier self that
Jeremy never noticed and Tony was never allowed to see.
“Mr
Slurry, come in, please, I’m so sorry to keep you.”
Slowey
seemed not to have moved a muscle although Marjorie wasn’t sure the ink stain
on his right hand had been there a few minutes before.
“It’s
no trouble, Mrs Jennings.”
“Oh,
please call me Marjorie. Tea?”
“T
is for trouble,” announced Jeremy. “It’s also for terror and thermal and trauma
and Thermopylae.”
“He’s
a clever lad, Marjorie.”
“I
am a clever and perspicacious fellow and I know what not to say because I have
manners of the most exemplary kind.”
“Please
excuse him, Mr Slurry. How do you take your tea?”
“Slowey.
With a ‘w’. Two sugars please. I’m cutting down.”
“You
don’t need to, surely,” she chuckled, hoping it sounded spontaneous, as she
switched on the kettle and lifted down the biscuit tin. “There’s nothing on you
but muscle.”
“What
does he mean, Marjorie?” asked the policeman, staring at Jeremy.
“Oh,
he just likes to talk, to play with words. I don’t think he means anything.”
“Elucidation
required…”
“A
biscuit, Mr Slurry? We have custard creams and….”
“…I
must not say anything other than….”
“Jeremy,
really, the policeman doesn’t have time for your nonsense.”
“….that
which I am allowed to reiterate unto you.”
“What
a mysterious fellow he is,” said Slowey, shrugging. “Do I see ginger nuts,
Marjorie? Magic, you’re spoiling me.”
“Yes,”
she gasped, clutching the tin, wondering if you really could knock someone
unconscious with a round metal object without doing serious damage. The
policeman wasn’t too much taller than her so she could probably bring it down
on the crown of his head with a respectable amount of force if she put her
heart into it.
Yet
all her professional training, the long years of her twenties spent dealing
with gaping lacerations and depressed skull fractures, suggested the harmless
knock-out blow was nothing more than a fiction to hurry a novel or a film
along. She proffered the tin instead.
“Please
take as many as you like. You keep your strength up.”
“You’re
very kind. Now, I am sorry to….”